Adulthood On Delay: Why Millennials Are In A Bind

Here’s what I want to know – why did talking about the death of the middle and working classes in America make Bernie Sanders a grassroots phenomenon, make Donald Trump president, but make me a ‘whiny entitled fuck that wants a participation trophy?’

The shit affecting Millennials isn’t affecting only us. Nearly two thirds of Americans across the board, have less than $1000 in savings, and are one emergency room trip away from financial ruin. There’s 318.9 million people living in this country. That means 197.7 million people are living in a constant state of financial despair.

While that linked article blames those numbers on our ‘spend first, think later’ culture, and people living beyond their means, which to be fair, is true in some cases – you would think people might look more deeply into such a widespread state of terror than just taking another opportunity to shit on poor people.

It’s almost like hating poor people is a cornerstone of our culture or something.

“And WalMart isn’t the only corporate welfare queen. The fast food industry is costing taxpayers $7 billion a year, with McDonald’s alone taking up a cool billion of that.”

Plot Twist: Saving Money Is Hard When You Don’t Make Any

While we all know at least one person making double or triple what we do, who constantly travels and shops, and then cries poor, most Americans are crying poor because they are poor. Across all age groups too.

We are statistically so fucked. Think about it. 1% of the entire working American population works at WalMart. And WalMart is famous for fucking with their employees. In 2013, after Gawker started posting horror stories from employees of The Mart, the company sent out an internal memo begging employees to say nice things about them.

This is about as nice as it got overall:

“Walmart is where the poor go to work until they die”

Yikes.

1% of the entire American population – that’s 2 million people, are employed by a company that notoriously tortures and underpays workers. They pay so little that their workers can’t afford health care, food, or even housing. How the fuck are they supposed to be saving? How, exactly? Where the fuck is that money gonna come from? When you’re a flu away from homelessness you aren’t stashing money away in your 401K.

WalMart: Welfare Queen

Turns out that WalMart’s low prices and complete disregard for human life are actually costing you. Even if you don’t give a shit about poor people, hear me out. I have had to sit through lectures from my grandparents about how all the people using public assistance are scum. Meanwhile, three of their grandchildren, including me, were on Medicaid. I know how y’all are. However, all these companies out here paying full time employees like it doesn’t matter if they live or die are actually inconveniencing you.

In 2013, it was estimated WalMart cost taxpayers $6.2 billion. Because if they aren’t paying for their employees housing, healthcare, and food; you are. That’s right. A family, that as of 2016 has an $8.7 billion fortune, is making you foot the bill for their employees’ housing and food. And WalMart isn’t the only corporate welfare queen. The fast food industry is costing taxpayers $7 billion a year, with McDonald’s alone taking up a cool billion of that.

But I want fucking handouts because I want the shit people in almost every other first world country have?

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are basically textbook anime protagonist/antagonist vibes. Both came with a message of ‘The System Is Fucking You, Everything Is Terrible, and We Must Attack;’ but Bernie Sanders actually meant it and wants to change it. Donald Trump mostly just wants to watch hours of TV a day, play golf, make sure big oil can piss in our waterways, and probably do some Dick Cheney level alleged war profiteering.

So, when two rich white dudes say that the system sucks, they are the favorites for holding the most powerful position on earth, but when the people actually getting fucked by the system call it out, we are full of shit?

Bernie Sanders is one of the most popular presidential hopefuls of all time for calling the system out, but all the protestors calling the system out are just whiny unemployed millennials?

Conservatives need to make up their damn minds. Are protesters unemployed thumb-sucking wastoids? Or are we sinister paid operatives in the vast liberal conspiracy of Kenyan supervillain Barack Obama, tasked with creating chaos at right wing town halls?

If we are getting paid to protest, then aren’t we employed?

There are many mysteries.

(I’m a sinister paid operative, FYI….ladies.)

Ugh

I guess what it all boils down to is, if you’re a rich old white man in a suit, people take you seriously, regardless of what you actually do or say. Even if you’ve only got a few of those things down, people still don’t want to hear from you. One of my personal favorite quotes about this comes from comedian Russell Brand, who has at least half of those things on lock, but doesn’t wear suits and isn’t 90, so no one wants to hear him out. In a 2013 interview with The Guardian he said:

“When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter, now I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want inequality on the agenda.”

Even Bernie Sanders, practically America’s only independent in office, has a minimum net worth $160K. While this seems like a lot, he’s pretty jank by the standards of the U.S. Senate, where the median minimum net worth is about a million dollars.

What Millennials are actually experiencing is the same death of the middle class Bernie and Trump tapped into, and Clinton kinda tried to act like was real, but not really. The same shit that is making everything hard for Americans of every age is making it hard for us. However, when we bring it up, we’re full of shit. While this article from Time Magazine interestingly devil’s advocates itself, it brings up the the popular criticism of Millennials that we are entitled and disenchanted with the world around us. It also completely fails to understand why.

But Isn’t Depression Just A Fancy Word For Being Bummed Out?

We’re not sad because our parents raised us to believe in ourselves, and told us that we could all could be Kim Kardashian. Hell, most of us were raised by people who were repeating the same cycles of abuse, unhappiness, and/or total failure that their parents repeated. The middle class is on its way out. Statistically, most of us are already making less than our parents did when they were our age.

What a lot of people with all kinds of opinions on Millennials fail to take into account is the widespread mental illness amongst our generation.

While they are calling us a bunch of useless narcissists who exist in some kinda sheltered selfie-love bubble, high school kids today have the levels of anxiety found in the average psychiatric patients of the ‘50s. Suicide is the second biggest killer of college students. And that’s honestly understandable. It always bummed me out being in college full time, working two jobs, wanting to die, and having to listen to everyone over 40 tell me I was a spoiled house cat that had it easy.

We’re sad because all our lives we were told that you have to do these things to be an adult, and most of us cannot afford to do any of them. We feel trapped in an extended state of adolescence we don’t want to be in, and can’t find a way out of, because the traditional markers of success and the usual ways to get there don’t work anymore.

We’re not just disenchanted with the world around us. A lot of us are literally breaking apart at the seams. Honestly, we are dealing with the breakdown of the American dream head on as well as anyone could be expected to, probably.

This Is Nothing New

Most Americans have been systematically left in poverty, been abused by wealthier people on both a micro and macro level, and been blamed for it since the very beginning of our country. The only thing new is that it’s happening to enough uppity urban and suburban white people, like myself, for it to start to be acknowledged in the mainstream.

Kids from picket fence families are realizing that the best they can do with their $50,000 psych degree is get a customer service job, where people who consider them a lower form of life will torture them until the day they die. All these damn kids are finding out that when they complain, no one cares, because they’ve lost their class privileges. Class inequality is only a valid concern when old rich dudes, who might not even actually mean it, slap that shit on sentences like the ultimate Twitter hashtag.

And man are they pissed.

Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.